Tropico 3 Review

Date: 4/14/2010

By Ned Jordan

There has been plenty of debate over whether controlling a first-person
shooter with a keyboard and mouse or a gamepad is better. To-may-toe. To-mah-toe.
Both are equally effective as far as I'm concerned and Iím happy to play a
shooter either way. Strategy games are another matter entirely, though. These
games have long been darn near impossible to play and manage on a console, but
recent innovations such as radial menus and smarter control schemes have made
console-based strategy games a lot more playable, perhaps even viable. And then
you have Tropico 3, which manages to throw most of that away in its return to
the bad old days of console strategy game control. It's as if the developers in
charge of the port from the PC to the Xbox 360 never really played a console
game before - they certainly haven't played any recent console strategy games at
least. The first mistake is that the interface is completely unchanged from the
PC version of the game. An interface with tabbed dialogs and Windows and mouse
friendly controls such as sliders and buttons just doesn't work well for a
mouse-less console game. On the Xbox 360 version of the game you're faced with
holding down a couple of buttons at once and hopping around the controller face
as you navigate your way through a set of tabbed dialogs. The control scheme is
awkward enough that I felt that it had to be addressed from the very start of
this review. If you're interested in the game, and have a PC that you can use to
play games, check out the review of its PC version and decide from there if it's
your kind of game. Otherwise, you should think about whether or not it's worth
it to you to put up with the control awkwardness to play it, and proceed only if
you have a tolerance for such things.

Tropico 3 is a city-building sim at its core, placing you in the role of the
dictator of a small Caribbean island nation in the mid-Twentieth Century. The
game is essentially a collection of scenarios that gives you an island with a
few buildings on it and then challenges you to meet a set of goals within a set
time limit. These goals are generally along the lines of meeting an export
target, attracting a certain number of tourists to your island, or merely
avoiding a coup for a few decades. You need to worry about the many of the
typical kinds of things that you do in a city sim - keeping your treasury in the
black, providing jobs and housing for your citizens, and building the
infrastructure to keep your city humming. Tropico 3 adds a twist to this formula
in that your population is divided into a number of factions, and since
different groups may have diametrically opposed desires, it's impossible to keep
them all happy at once. You'll have to constantly juggle priorities to keep
enough of the people happy enough of the time so that they don't rebel against
you or vote someone else into office. You might be able to buy one group off by
building something for them (the religious faction loves churches), issuing
edicts such as launching a literacy program to keep the intellectuals off of
your back, or you can resort to sending the secret police after a particularly
noisy rabble-rouser or rebel.

The game has a decidedly humorous take on things, which begins with the
briefing message you'll see before each mission. When you enter a mission you'll
be able to customize your dictator, including dressing him up as a pirate in a
beret if you'd like. The customization screen is also useful for changing your
dictator's traits to suit the goals at hand, such as making him a former farmer
to give your crops a boost. Once you're on your island the game will serenade
you with tropical beats occasionally punctuated with news reports from a DJ that
are always tongue in cheek. It's too bad that the soundtrack is so small and the
DJ reports so few in number, because what should have been great atmosphere for
the game becomes repetitive far too quickly instead.